| This dissertation describes the sequence of Joseph Haydn's compositional activities from the inception of work on a piece through the establishment of a final version by: (1) surveying the preliminary compositional materials for instrumental music and their related final drafts, and (2) examining the contemporary written reports of Haydn's compositional activities--his letters, the conversations and observations recorded by his two biographers, Griesinger and Dies, and indirectly, the compositional handbook by Koch. This study sheds light not only on Haydn's compositional procedure, but also on the considerations that guided his written work.;The discoveries of hitherto unidentified sorts of sketches, "model" sketches and sketches preceding the continuity draft, justified viewing the music in analytical-reductive terms. They document Haydn's self-conscious musical abstraction and detailed long-range planning that may have been surmised, but never before so clearly evidenced.;In comparison to the number of pieces that Haydn wrote, very few sources revealing the composer's preliminary work survive, and these come mostly from the last two decades of his career. However, these documents confirm and elaborate the written reports, providing a consistent picture of a process involving three main stages: phantasieren, or garnering ideas while playing the keyboard, componieren, resulting in a continuity draft, and setzen, resulting in a final draft. Paleographic analysis formed a basis for evaluating the preliminary documents, but Haydn's idiomatic and idiosyncratic methods of bringing his ideas to fruition, with frequent gaps between sketch entries, necessitated in-depth musical analysis of both sketch document and final version in order to discover the development in trains of thought. |
